146 THE STRAWBERRY IN NORTH AMERICA 



was made to overcome this fault by stimulating the plants 

 highly with nitrogenous fertilizer, runners were produced 

 freely, but the plants reverted to the spring-bearing type. 

 The Pan-American never became popular, but it furnished 

 the starting point of the long-desired race of dependable 

 everbearers. The origmator immediately began to raise 

 seedlings from it. The first of these to show value was 

 Autumn; later he introduced Productive, Superb and 

 several others, all of Pan-American stock. The Superb is 

 the best of Cooper's varieties. 



Meanwhile, another breeder had been working on the 

 problem independently. About 1896, Harlow Rockhill, 

 of Conrad, Iowa, began work with Louis Gautier, which 

 showed considerable inclination to bear fruit on part 

 of its runners, in wet seasons. He soon became con- 

 vinced that the everbearing character could not be fixed 

 in this variety by selection and began crossing it with a 

 number of American sorts. Some of his seedlings of 

 Louis Gautier X Sample were quite promising. In 

 1904 he secured the Pan-American and crossed it with 

 Louis Gautier, with this result: "Seeds were sown 

 in window boxes in February, 1905, from crosses made 

 the preceding fall. Some of the resulting seedlings 

 fruited the following August and September. These 

 were, perhaps, the first strawberry plants on record, of 

 the large-fruited varieties, to bear the same year the seed 

 was sown. There were many freaks among these seed- 

 lings. One sent out runners twelve to sixteen inches long, 

 which rooted and produced three to five trusses of fruit 

 each. Most of the runners produced no plant buds ; after 

 fruiting, all such runners died back to the mother plant. 

 Another seedling had running fruit stems about twelve 

 inches long with three separate settings of fruit. These 



